Reality is stressful makes you want to relax maby play a video game and distract you from the news. Something fantasy like world of warcraft couldn't have any semblance to reality right? Wrong believe it or not there was actually a virtual plague in world of warcraft. Oddly enough it was a good study in epidemiology and how populations react to a similar situation.

For a little context on September 13 2005 blizzard the company that made world of warcraft added a new raid with a new end boss "Hakkar the Soulflayer". This boss had an area effect called corrupted blood witch had a 100% infection rate for any character in the area of those infected. It was intended to be fatal or recovered from by the time the player made it to a town. Due to a technical oversight npcs and character pets where susceptible to the "corrupted blood " however they didn't die from it or recover. The npcs where acting as vectors and spread the plague to the player characters .lower level players where weaker and couldn't withstand the damage that "corrupted blood " to them it was fatal.

Oddly enough the first thing players is self isolate fleeing population centers. Even more curious is that some higher level players with healing abilities tried to evacuate weaker character's. This was in attempt to stop the server from being taken down and patched. However not every person reacted responsibly some players reacted by trying to spread the plague. Blizzard attempted a voluntary quarantine however it failed because most didn't take it seriously.

Finally after trying to institute in game security failed on October 8th

2005 they shutdown and patched the server. A similar problem arose on January 12th 2017 called green fire. They quickly reacted and immediately quarantined and sterilized the affected players.